Facino laughed. 'You hear the lad? Would you be so cruel as to deny him?'
She recaptured betimes the wits which surprise had scattered, and prudently dissembled her dismay. On a more temperate note, from which all passion was excluded, she replied:
'He's such a child to be going to the wars!'
'A child! Pooh! Who would become master should begin early. At his age I was leader of a troop.'
He laughed again. But he was not to laugh later, when he recalled this trivial incident.
CHAPTER VII
MANŒUVRES
Shortly before midnight they rode out from the Palace of the old Broletto: Facino, attended by Bellarion for his esquire, a page bestriding a mule that was laden with his armour, and a half-dozen men-at-arms.
Facino was silent and pensive. His lady's farewells had lacked the tenderness he craved, and the Duke whose battles he went to fight had not even been present to speed him. He had left the palace to go forth upon this campaign, slinking away like a discharged lackey. The Duke, he had been told, was absent, and for all that he was well aware of the Duke's detestable pernoctations, he preferred to believe that this was merely another expression of that ill will which, despite all that he had done and all that it lay in his power to do, the Duke never failed to display towards him.
But as the little company rode in the bright moonlight down the borgo of Porta Giovia, out of a narrow side street emerged a bulky man, almost dragged along by three great hounds straining at the leash and yelping eagerly, their noses to the ground. A slender figure in a cloak followed after him, calling petulantly as he came: